1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a matching device for a character recognizing apparatus such as an optical character reader (OCR).
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, character recognizing apparatuses such as an OCR perform matching of one optically-scanned character (an unknown character) and each of all characters registered in dictionary data (dictionary characters) and find characters having high degrees of similarity to thereby recognize the unknown character (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 9-179935 and Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 3-116393). In general, processing for this matching is performed by using a large scale integration (LSI). To increase speed of the processing for the matching, the dictionary data is dividedly stored in a plurality of memories and distributed processing is performed in the LSI. In recent years, according to the progress in the semiconductor technology, memory access speed has been increased and a size of a circuit that can be incorporated in the LSI has been increased. Therefore, a character recognizing apparatus including a matching device that can perform matching of a plurality of unknown characters at higher speed using parallel processing is developed (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 5-128311).
However, in the technology disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 5-128311, even if the matching can be performed at higher speed by the parallel processing, if the size of the circuit incorporated in the LSI is large, cost increases. Therefore, there is a demand for a reduction in size of a circuit of the LSI in the matching device that performs the matching for character recognition using the parallel processing.